I agree with you that the instant feeback is one of the greatest things that digital has to offer. I played with the lighting setup for an ebay sale pic and kept taking the one pic over and over with different angles and lighting arrangements until it looked right. I've learned more about lighting and perspective in these few weeks with the instant feeback than any other time period.
rg
Mark Cassino wrote:
I got my *ist-D over a week ago, but between having to log in some serious hours getting ready for an art fair later this week, and the utterly crappy / gloomy weather, I haven't really had the time to do much with it. I _have_ managed to shoot about 900 images though - my last surviving cat is exceedingly well documented at this point.
I gotta say, Pentax has really come through with this one - no notable complaints at all (though I may chime in with a pet peeve here and there...)
The most fun thing - the sun broke out of the clouds for about 30 minutes today and so I was able to test out the *ist-D's IR capabilities. I have a Hoya RM90 IR filter - filters out most of the visible spectrum of light. I popped it onto a Sigma 50mm f2.8 macro (the only lens I had handy with 55mm threads to match the filter) and tested the *ist-D's IR. Here's a couple of samples:
My back fence with ivy: http://www.markcassino.com/temp/istir01.jpg
The street in front of my house: http://www.markcassino.com/temp/istit02.jpg
A wooden chair and two flower pots: http://www.markcassino.com/temp/istir03.jpg
Looks _very_ promising! The unaltered shots are a magenta to lilac color, and required long exposures (at ISO 400 I was shooting 20 - 30 seconds at f11 - in sunlight but not super bright/clear sun). The first image is the red channel from the unaltered image, the second image resolved itself into the green-grey when I hit auto-colors in Photoshop. The third image is the Blue channel.
Aside from silly IR stuff, I've had the chance to test the camera with a variety of lenses. It works great with the 1.7x AF adapter an A* 400 f2.8 - that 1.5x crop effect really adds to the reach. A sample (from my very first morning out with the camera):
http://www.markcassino.com/temp/IMGP0178.jpg
The light was crap - I did not find the cranes that day till the sun was too high up. And, yes, I did a cheesy guassian blur on the background (that corn stubble looks like hell). But the bird is relatively sharp and the frost on the corn stubble pops out nicely though.
On the shorter end of the focal lengths, that multiplier really hits the wide angles. My Sigma 14mm f3.5 works fine, but by it's nature (front element is a semi-sphere) it picks up all sorts of flare. The 17-28 fisheye loses too much of the fisheye effect - at 17mm it seems to have the AOV of a 20mm (judging by the finder) but has too much distortion to look good, and not enough distortion to look like a cool fisheye. So it just looks like a wide angle lens with bad distortion. Ug.
I've very happy with it with the A*200mm macro. I found a leaf footed bug stuck between the main window and the storm window yesterday, so I took it in and set it up on a large potted plant. The bug looked like hell. there was virtually no ambient light in the house - at ISO 800 I was getting a meter reading of half a second at f4. But I got the bug in front of a lamp and fired up the flash to snap a shot of it cleaning it's feelers:
http://www.markcassino.com/temp/IMGP0839.jpg
The bug was covered with some sort of crud - possibly cobwebs from the window. But the sharpness and detail in the one shot I got was really great. (I left the room for a minute and bug took off somewhere - haven't seen it since.) One pet peeve here - the Pentaprism on the *ist-D intrudes upon the tripod mount on the A*200 - so you can't rotate the lens on the mount.
Lastly, the thing I _really_ like is the freedom to shoot whatever. And the instant feedback lets you adjust the image on the fly for tricky subjects. So I _finally_ got a shot that captures (even exaggerates) the subtle rainbow hues I see in wisps of light bouncing off my bathroom doorknob. (My life as a photographer is now complete...)
http://www.markcassino.com/temp/IMGP0714.jpg
I gotta upgrade my flash cards and it looks like my 25mzh 486 laptop is finally obsolete (that 200 meg drive won't hold many RAW files) - but I'm putting my fall film order on hold. Overall - it's a helluva great camera.
- MCC
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Mark Cassino Photography
Kalamazoo, MI
http://www.markcassino.com
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